The rat

Imagine a data center. Steel and glass, endless racks with servers, futuristic blue lights, thousands of hard drives, kilometers of cables, three power sources, ridiculous amounts of information, automatic backups for everything. You sit in your cabinet with eight monitors like a true hacker from that movie. Something is off, isn't it?
Yes, there is something. A repeating anomaly in some data flows. Sometimes it's there. Sometimes it's not. It's time for an investigation. You open the terminal and the journey begins. Logs, reports, more logs, more reports, some coffee. The logs will never end. You spend hours, days, nights, weeks, trying to locate it. It's there. But where is it? It's in your data, but there is no reason for it to be there. You start to question yourself at some moment. It's true madness. You're chasing a ghost in the net.
One day some newbie guard is getting lost, walks into a wrong corridor, and finds a big rat chewing on one of your cables.
The rat!
You didn't see that coming, did you? Yes, they eat cables. Now you know that. And they're not ghosts, obviously. You got a degree in computer science, but nobody ever told you that sometimes you have to get out of your terminal, stand up, and have a good walk around the building, looking for actual rats.
But this story is not about those curious animals. It's about the limits of knowledge. Sometimes you cannot catch a ghost because your data is very limited. Very. Limited. You expect to find a solution in your logs, looking for small inconsistencies in numbers, but you don't notice a whole offline world outside. Wake up, Neo. Follow the rat.
I was thinking about the hard problem of consciousness recently. It looks similar to this situation. We cannot solve it using the available data because we don't notice something really big. It doesn't mean we cannot learn the truth. We just have to get out of our information bubbles.
But how do we find a conscious rat if we don't know that the offline world exists? Is it possible to make a right guess without any external help? We can create new things by combining and mutating old things, following the process of evolution, but every step depends on the previous steps. It's like a mental trap that doesn't allow us to imagine some things outside of the tree of combinations.
Do we really have to wait for some external entity to make observations and reveal the knowledge to us? It doesn't look like a solid strategy.